Part 1 - In the Beginning: Frank Sinatra with the Harry James Orchestra
"Sinatra, in other words, was neither pioneer nor radical. He was simply a musical genius who arrived at a moment predestined for that genius." - Henry Pleasants
© Introduction Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“He regards his voice as an instrument without equal, and although he tries scrupulously to be polite about the possessors of other renowned voices, he is apt—if the name of a competitor comes up abruptly in conversation—to remark: "I can sing that son of a bitch off the stage any day in the week!"
E. J. Kahn, in a New Yorker Profile in 1946
“When I started singing in the mid-1930's [he wrote in an article, "Me and My Music" for Life in 1965] everybody was trying to copy the Crosby style—the casual kind of raspy sound in the throat. Bing was on top, and a bunch of us—Dick Todd, Bob Eberly, Perry Como and Dean Martin—were trying to break in. It occurred to me that maybe the world didn't need another Crosby. I decided to experiment a little and come up with something different. What I finally hit on was more the bel canto Italian school of singing, without making a point of it. That meant I had to stay in better shape because I had to sing more. It was more difficult than Crosby's style, much more difficult.”
“Frank was not the first popular singer to be guided unwittingly by the objectives and criteria of be] canto as codified by [Pier Francesco] Tosi. Others before him had worked intuitively toward a kind of singing closer to the rhetorical objectives of early Italian opera, and Frank could profit by their example. His accomplishment was to unite the rhetorical with the melodic, much as Italian singers of the seventeenth century had done as they progressed from the recitativo, parlando and arioso procedures of Caccini and Monteverdi to the more sustained, mellifluous manner of singing represented by the term bel canto.
Sinatra, in other words, was neither pioneer nor radical. He was simply a musical genius who arrived at a moment predestined for that genius.”
Henry Pleasants, The Great American Popular Singers [1974]
At the time of its publication in 1968, Mr. Shaw was considered Frank Sinatra’s biographer.
Obviously, since that time, Sinatra: Twentieth Century Romantic has been superseded by other biographies but not, in my opinion, surpassed.
I think Shaw’s bio is particularly strong on the early years of Frank’s career from which I’ve drawn this feature on Sinatra’s time with the Harry James Orchestra and the subsequent feature on Frank’s tenure with Tommy Dorsey’s Band.
Looking back on what has to be considered one of the greatest careers in American Pop Music and Culture, it’s quite inspiring to read how this all grew out of Sinatra’s relatively humbling beginnings as a band singer.
But Life is what you make of it, especially if you believe in yourself and work hard to keep mastering your art.
Almost 75 years before it was published, Frank personified many of the practices contained in Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool’s Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise [2016] especially the book’s principle theory that we all have the ability to create, with the right sort of training and practice, abilities that we would not otherwise possess by taking advantage of the incredible adaptability of the human brain and body.
In the broadest sense the book imparts a fundamentally new way of thinking about human potential, one that suggests we have far more power than we ever realize to take control of our own lives.
Almost at the outset of his journey, Frank understood that every facet and aspect of his career was about creating the highest level of expertise to become one of the greatest popular singers and entertainers of all time.
Copyright ® Arnold Shaw, copyright protected; all rights reserved, the author claims no right of copyright usage.
Frank Sinatra, Harry James and The Big Band Era
“A LEGENDARY STORY of the Big Band era concerns portly Paul Whiteman, whose dance orchestra drew large crowds to the Roof Garden of the Biltmore Hotel in New York. One evening, an influential song-plugger arrived with a tall, stately girl whom he introduced as the Duchess. Duly impressed, Whiteman treated her with great deference, as did all the song-pluggers at the dinner table. They were drinking coffee when suddenly Whiteman's face turned crimson, and the hand holding his cup began to shake visibly. The contact men pretended not to notice. But they all knew that the Duchess was at the moment gently running her hand up and down Whiteman's leg. The Duchess was no duchess but just a lively lady of the evening.
It made for a big laugh when it happened and for an even bigger laugh in the retelling. Practical jokes were a staple of the all-male scene that was the music business. To relieve the tedium of long, late hours, characters were in demand. It was an era that had color and camaraderie. Young Sinatra liked it, found expression in it, and took from it many things that flavored his later off-stage activities. The all-male entourage, variously known as the Varsity (hep), the Rat Pack (hip), and the Clan (that's boss), had its beginnings here. The horseplay, the needling, the glorification of friendship, the sports-oriented slang—a plug that did not materialize was a "curve"—all were characteristic of an era when broadcasts of the live performance, not recordings, created hit songs.
Many of Sinatra's later locutions originate here: for example, his use of "ville" as a suffix—"bombsville" for a song that flops, "scrams-ville" for "they ran off," etc. A "broad" was a broad among music men long before Frank helped popularize it. Another word of Negro origin, shortened by Frank in public appearances to "mother," was an accolade of high praise even then.
At the Rustic Cabin [where he worked before joining Harry James] Sinatra came into contact with this fringe of show business. Boasting only local air-time, the Cabin did not draw the top pluggers who contacted hit-makers like Jimmy Dorsey at the Pennsylvania, Guy Lombardo and his "businessman's bounce" at the Roosevelt, or Glenn Miller at the Glen Island Casino. The lesser pluggers who visited the Cabin were after the small-audience "sheet shots" that swelled totals during a "drive," a week in which performances were bunched to make a song number one on plug charts. But like their more successful colleagues, they spoke a brittle lingo—a tab was "the hot" or "the third rail"; you got a shock when you touched it—and they worked at mastering the black arts of "the con," romance and payola. The word "payola" was current in the music world long before a 1959 congressional investigating committee gave it national currency.
For young Sinatra, the dull, sometimes depressing, eighteen months he spent at the Cabin were enlivened by the wiry ways of the contact men. Naturally, he "hyped" the song-pluggers to hype his singing with name bandleaders. Eventually, the combination of broadcasts over WNEW's "Dance Parade" and plugger word-of-mouth worked. Trumpeter Harry James came one memorable evening to hear him sing.
All through the days of Sinatra's vocalizing at the Cabin, big bands were proliferating at such a rate that Down Beat's tabulation of band itineraries included nearly seven hundred aggregations. Bestseller lists of the day consisted almost exclusively of dance disks, with those responsible for vocal choruses receiving no credit on record labels. On bandstands, singers generally posed as instrumentalists, holding guitars with rubber strings or pretending to blow wind instruments. It was a bouncing era, the roar of massive brass providing a joyful accompaniment for a world recovering from the Depression and trying the togetherness of the New Deal.
The Harry James band was one of several, including Lionel Hampton's, Teddy Wilson's, and Gene Krupa's, that emanated from the Benny Goodman orchestra. Formed in 1939, it was bankrolled by Willard Alexander, an ex-MCA agent, and The Ray himself. (The Ray was a musician's nickname for Goodman, resulting from his piercing glance on the bandstand.) After break-in dates out of town, it played its first major booking at the Pennsylvania Hotel. The notices of March, 1939 were friendly but hardly exciting. When James trekked out to Alpine [New Jersey] to catch young Sinatra, his band was playing an unspectacular engagement at the Paramount, and Frank was maneuvering to get into the Bob Chester band in which a Jersey City neighbor, Harry Schuchman, played tenor sax.
"I liked Frank's way of taking a lyric," James said later, "and I went back the following night with Gerard Barrett, my manager, and we signed him for seventy-five dollars a week." Since the contract was for two years, Sinatra was jubilant, as he drove that June night to Jersey City where Nancy Sinatra, who was still holding a twenty-five-dollar-a-week secretarial job, waited in their third-floor walkup.
Sinatra's first appearance with the James band was at the Hippodrome Theatre in Baltimore during the week of June 30, 1939. His vocals on "Wishing" and "My Love for You" went uncelebrated. Thereafter, the band settled at the Roseland Ballroom on Broadway, today the site of the City Squire Motor Inn. Except for a seven-day breather on the windswept Atlantic City Steel Pier, which developed into a three-week booking, the band remained at Roseland all through the hot summer of the 1939 World's Fair. It was here that Frank's singing received its first critical scrutiny. Writing in Metronome, George Simon approved "the very pleasing vocals of Frank Sinatra whose easy phrasing is especially commendable." Only recently Simon revealed that Frank's "need of approbation was reflected in a somewhat unusual routine by James' manager who . . . followed me almost to the street as he jockeyed, not for a good review of the band itself, but for good notices for the boy. 'He wants a good write-up more than anybody I've ever seen,' Gerard Barrett said."
After Labor Day, the orchestra traveled to Chicago, where it opened at the Hotel Sherman. On October 7, a Billboard reviewer wrote of Frank at the Panther Room: "Vocalist Frank Sinatra handles the torchy ballads in a pleasing way in good voice. Only blemish is that he touches the songs with a little too much pash, which is not all convincing. . . ." By contrast, trumpeter Jack Palmer, responsible for the hi-de-ho numbers, knew "all the angles." Variety made no reference to Sinatra until a month later, when a reviewer found "little appeal" in either side of a new James record "Here Comes the Night" backed with "From the Bottom of My Heart."
About the same time, Down Beat reported a conversation between James and a staffer that went this way: Reporter: "Who's that skinny little singer? He sings a great song." Harry James: "Not so loud. The kid's name is Sinatra. He considers himself the greatest vocalist in the business. Get that! No one ever heard of him. He's never had a hit record. He looks like a wet rag. But he says he is the greatest. If he hears you compliment him, he'll demand a raise tonight . . ."
By this time, James had discovered that his male vocalist was not only confident, but strong-minded in other ways. Immediately after signing him, Harry had suggested that Frank change his name, a procedure almost as common among singers as screen stars. Frank rejected the suggestion, pointing out that he had a cousin who was doing quite well "in spite of" the Sinatra surname. Ray Sinatra was then musical conductor of several of radio's top dramatic series.
After two and a half months at the Panther Room, the James band trekked westward. Unlike the Goodman band in its formative days, James encountered only problems as he traveled toward the California coast. While he himself was extremely popular and was voted number one among the nation's trumpeters in Down Beat's annual poll, his orchestra finished a weak number twelve in the swing band sweepstakes. That year, largely as a result of "Back Bay Shuffle" and his double-faced recording of "Begin the Beguine," clarinetist Artie Shaw displaced Goodman as the number one Collegiate Choice of Orchestras, only to be toppled the following year by Glenn Miller, who held the top spot in 1941 and 1942 with "Little Brown Jug," "In the Mood," and "Moonlight Serenade."
The low point of the James band's dipping fortunes came in Los Angeles, where it arrived for a November booking at the Palomar Ballroom. The famous dance hall where the Goodman band had scored its initial success was out of business, having burned during a Charlie Barnett date. Fighting to meet his weekly payroll, James took a substitute booking at Victor Hugo's in Beverly Hills. It was a mistake. "The chichi crowd didn't dig our loud kind of music," James later lamented, "and the help outnumbered the customers. After days of complaints and an empty dance floor, the management canceled us. To make matters worse, they refused to pay us." (Rudy Vallee, who had just left the "Fleischmann Hour" after 518 consecutive appearances as host, was hastily called to front Garwood Van's mickey-mouse band.) As James and his orchestra headed unhappily back east, a lawsuit resulting from an old accident case led to an attachment of the band's funds. Unable to afford two vocalists, James fired Connie Haines and kept Sinatra.
While Christmas, 1939 represented the lowest ebb in the life of the new James band, it had a slightly different meaning for young Sinatra. Nancy, who had traveled with the band for a time, was back in Jersey City awaiting the birth of their first child. And Frank was on the verge of leaving the floundering Harry James orchestra for a job with the band that was number one among the nation's sweet bands (DownBeat).
Apart from opening the door to the Tommy Dorsey orchestra, the stint with James led to the first hit record of Sinatra's solo career, a hit that did not materialize until almost four years after its initial release. Frank participated in six recording sessions during his tenure with James, the earliest on July 13, 1939, when he sang "From the Bottom of My Heart" and "Melancholy Mood," and the last on November 8, when he cut "Every Day of My Life" and "Ciribiribin." The all-important session which yielded "All or Nothing At All" came on August 31. A September Billboard advertisement, announcing the release of the record, contains no mention of the Sinatra vocal, while Down Beat dismissed the disk with the observation that "the band had a long way to go." Sales of the record totaled a meager eight thousand copies, due in part, perhaps, to the deadlock with the broadcasters that kept ASCAP music off the air in 1940. Rereleased, however, in 1943, after Sinatra had left Dorsey on his solo career, "All or Nothing At All" became a runaway best-seller. Both "Ciribiribin" and the ballad hit may be heard in the Columbia album The Frank Sinatra Story in Music. They make a curious contrast. In the former, Sinatra is the self-assured band singer, effortlessly delivering a vocal of sustained tones against the chugging James band; he is relaxed but also emotionally uninvolved. Yet in the torch ballad, recorded months earlier, he displays a sensitivity to texture and an expressive handling of the lyrics, characteristic of the later soloist.
Frank's ride with Harry James, scheduled to last two years, ground to a pleasant but unanticipated halt shortly after Christmas, 1939. Tommy Dorsey made an offer and James, who held a contract he could have enforced, permitted his skinny vocalist to leave. "We dissolved with a handshake," James has said. "Frank was expecting a baby then and he needed the extra money. But I never did get around to tearing up the contract. If any of his managers had thought to come to me, Frank later wouldn't have had to pony up all that money to settle with Dorsey.
Legally, he was under contract to me."
Dorsey did not make it easy for Sinatra's predecessor to leave him. Jack Leonard, considered the best band vocalist in the business in 1939, had been responsible for the silver-voiced vocals on Dorsey's hits, including the famous "Marie." By the fall of the year, however, the trade press was asking: "What's this about songbird JL leaving TD?"
Sinatra has said that Dorsey became interested in him as the result of a Harry James disk, perhaps even the "All or Nothing At All" recording, played for the trombone man by a publisher seeking a cover record. Jimmy Hilliard, then music supervisor at CBS in Chicago, remembers talking to Dorsey about Sinatra at Blackie's, a Windy City restaurant. Hilliard, who had played with both Dorseys, was having dinner with the trombonist one night when Tommy spent much of the meal griping about his difficulties with Jack Leonard.
"Have you heard the skinny kid who's singing with Harry James?" Hilliard asked.
"He's nothing to look at, but he's got a sound." And Hilliard told Dorsey of his experience at the James opening in the Panther Room. "My back was to the bandstand," he reported. "But when the kid started taking a chorus, I had to turn around. I couldn't resist going back the next night to hear him again. He's got something besides problems with acne. Harry can't be paying him much. Maybe you can take him away."
Negotiations were carried on by Bobby Burns, manager of the Dorsey band. A note slipped backstage to Frank inviting him to phone Dorsey. The following clay, Frank auditioned for the man in rimless glasses at the nearby Palmer House, where Dorsey was playing. The test was whether he could sing "Marie" in Jack Leonard's style. Sinatra thought he did well. Nevertheless, on November 18, a Billboard columnist wrote: "Now that it's safe to report that Jack Leonard left Dorsey on none too friendly terms, the replacement is Allan DeWitt."
Billboard added: "The odd quirk is that TD is holding a personal management contract on JL." In December, however, Billboard reported: "In spite of the fact that Leonard returns to the band, TD is going to keep Allan DeWitt sharing the lyric assignment." But then suddenly it was neither Leonard nor DeWitt. In its February issue Down Beat advised that Sinatra had left James on January 26 and that DeWitt was going with Bob Chester's band.
Shortly after the pieces came to rest, Jack Leonard appeared as a solo act at the New York Paramount. The usual publicity buildup was started. Stories appeared of how he was mobbed in Times Square by fans. But his attempt to break out of the big-band womb was either premature, or he lacked the qualities that made Sinatra a robust, if emaciated-looking, solo baby three years later. By the end of 1940 Leonard was in uniform.
An interesting sidelight on a twisted skein of relationships is that when Dorsey first hired Leonard in 1936, after spotting him at a Long Beach roadhouse, Jack insisted on bringing Axel Stordahl with him. Stordahl was then an arranger and trumpet player in the Bert Block band with which Leonard sang. Later, when Sinatra left Dorsey, he took Stordahl with him. It was the blond musician who helped create the lush, woodwind-string sound that became the distinguishing mark of popular ballad music in the 1940's and of Sinatra's records before the fall.
Frank and Nancy had mixed feelings about his departure from the James band. Frank has said of the snow-filled January night when he said goodbye: "It was after midnight. There was nobody around and I stood alone with my suitcase in the snow and watched the tail lights of the bus disappear. Then the tears started and I tried to run after the bus." Nancy also remembers the James days wistfully. Frequently, they ate only onion sandwiches for dinner, or Nancy cooked up a huge pot of spaghetti for all the boys. The band had the camaraderie and the excitement of men on the way up, while for Nancy, the days with Frank were without the complications that the big time brought.”